MEDIA RELEASE: Why is religious freedom under threat? - The Centre for Independent Studies
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MEDIA RELEASE: Why is religious freedom under threat?

Religion has been pushed to the margins of public life, falling an unintentional victim of efforts to eliminate discrimination.

Religion and the concomitant requirements of anti-discrimination legislation present Australia with competing and conflicting demands. Instead of allowing greater freedom to express religious belief in the public sphere, the effect has been to confine religious faith to the realm of subjective opinion.

A Quartet of Freedoms: Freedom of Religion, Speech, Association and Conscience is comprised of papers published from a seminar of the Religion and the Free Society program at The Centre for Independent Studies. The papers examine the context of the current debate about religious liberty and attempt to take stock of some the most significant challenges posed to religious liberty in Australia.

Formal participation in religious institutions is declining in this country but the contribution they make to Australian society remains strong. In addition to some 12,000 religious organisations that comprise the largest single group of not-for-profit organisations, a substantial number of religious charities provide services in education, health, disability and aged care. Clearly, religion continues to occupy a significant place in the Australian public square, and yet believers are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that religious faith is a positive rather than a negative feature of a liberal society.

If questions about value and fulfilment are important, the liberal state needs to enshrine and uphold the right to religious liberty as a fundamental human right.

Bishop Robert Forsyth argues that religious liberty needs to be seen not as a grudging exception granted by the liberal state but rather as a positive right enjoyed by very varied groups that combine to confer a public good upon society. “Society is not simply the state and the individual,” says Forsyth. “There are other locations of authority in civil society.” Religion, he argues, needs to be tolerated not for the truth claims it may make—indeed, these claims need never be accepted by secular society—but because of its capacity to pose important questions about meaning, value and the nature of obligation in society.

CIS Research Fellow Dr Jeremy Sammut examines the foundations for religious liberty as established in the Australian Constitution. He questions the militant secularist reading of section 116 of the Constitution, which holds that religion is never a legitimate social and moral force, and argues instead that the real purpose of the section is to prevent the State from restricting the open practice of religious belief. The Federal Fathers sought not to remove religion from the public sphere but to ensure that no group or community was privileged above any other.

 

The Right Reverend Robert Forsyth has been the Anglican Bishop of South Sydney since 2000. He is available for media comment.

Media Enquiries: CIS Communications and Editorial Manager Karla Pincott 0411 759 934